In the past couple of years, the market has seen a huge surge in startups. But nine out of ten startups lose their businesses within the first or second year of their operations. You need to be cognizant of every decision you make. And choosing the right CMS to power your website might come as one of the most critical choices you would make for your startup. Even though to some CMS research might look like an unprofitable expedition and would want to go with heard without much research, in reality, your CMS will ensure the livability of your website and your business in the longer run. Why would you want to compromise with anything?
While setting up an actual physical store is a big challenge and bigger is the presentation of your project, Drupal has stood the test of the time and is widely used for enterprise websites.
What’s new in Drupal 8 to suit your business?
We know that Drupal 8 is a widely popular choice for enterprises and is trusted by leading institution entities like whitehouse.gov and the United Nations. But how does the new version fulfill your criteria and needs? It has:
Better authoring experience: Drupal 8 includes WYSIWYG (wiz-ee-wig) program and in-place editing to let you know what the content would look like without waiting to ‘save’ the content and check the preview. Additionally, tools for content creation, workflow and publishing are what makes the authoring experience better. The new Drupal build also allows for an easy track of revisions and changes.You can even see the stage your product is in from creation to review and publication.
Structured content: Apart from better content authoring experience, Drupal 8’s strength lies in the structured content that helps you with SEO and better categorisation of products. The new Drupal comes with an inbuilt schema and provides you with meta tags and meta description for every content on your website. This structured content offering helps you with better taxonomy, from where the product can easily be found.
Scalable: When your site hits the peak traffic, Drupal 8 won’t go down. Drupal has stood the test of time, and the new Drupal version is proven to provide the best scalability. One of the busiest site, the weather company called weather.com, uses Drupal to manage its content.
More languages: Drupal 8 also brings more language handling abilities to deliver value to choose to work efficiently. You can install the latest Drupal in 94 languages, without the need of installing an additional component.
Mobile first: Mobile adaptability is one of the most receptive ideas to the new age of marketing. With each passing year, smartphones are reaching every remote corner of the world. And with everything on the Internet, it is possible to access anything, anywhere with a mobile handset. Thus, mobile adaptability of the site is one of the most premium demands of any company. While in the name of mobile responsiveness many websites provide only a shrunken version, Drupal 8 is a mobile-first content management framework and provides device friendly versions. With an increase in mobile usability, it is necessary that we have a website which is mobile responsive.
Content types: Your website is the presentation of your business. It should be dynamic — not static. Drupal 8 brings with it new and improved content types so that you can add different events and content such as blogs, questionnaires, polls, FAQs and press releases and separates them into different content forms. All this exerts complete control over the content without much fuss to add or omit things.
Why Drupal for your startup?
For any company, a website is a window to the culture and values of the organisation. It is very important to keep your website eccentric and free from repetitive themes. The same should be expected from the desired CMS, too. This promotes the idea of “uniqueness” and makes it likable. Drupal has more than 2,000 themes, over 35,000 modules and many distributions to save a lot of time and energy in building your website. And I believe that repetitive theories and themes only make the stage a dull place.
Drupal lets you avail modules such as views, panels and taxonomy that enhance not only the administration but also your users’ experience.
Also, it is easy and quick to build a site with Drupal. As a startup, you would need a CMS which provides you all the necessary features and saves your time from all the technicality and complications. Drupal is not just a CMS but a framework that delivers an overall holistic development of your website, securing it from all sort of hacking and malware attack, responsive theming, unmatched flexibility and scalability with easy admin and user control features.
Unlike other proprietary content systems, Drupal gives you an entire control over URL structure. Each page created in a Drupal site can have its own custom URL or URL alias. This can be setup to build search engine-friendly URLs based on content types and other related information.
Plus, Drupal delivers industry specific distributions, which help you setup your website rather quickly without the headache of adding different plugins.
Apart from the industry-based specialisation, Drupal provides easy collaboration with various essential software such as ERP, CRM, sales and marketing tools, to help you with better administration.
Distinguished experiences
Let us take a closer look at how Drupal proves to be industry-specific and helps different website verticals build successful websites.
Hospitality
If your product deals with a lot of small to medium resorts in various places, Drupal helps you with a responsive theme, homepage layout and creation of a custom page. It has ‘Bat module’ and ‘Easy booking’ that help in easy booking and online reservation.
E-commerce
Drupal helps you with simplified roles such as a customer, seller and web admin in the same platform. You might require various forums such as blogs, pictures, analysis, product display and other features that otherwise require complex content creation and management. But with Drupal, it is all easy to build. There is a ‘Commerce Kickstart’ distribution that makes your website flexible enough to define admin roles for easier management and tracking of the product without logging into too many accounts.
Media and publishing
Media platforms require regular updates and viral stories can push the traffic to its peak. Stories would be more authentic if they have pictures and videos attached to them. Drupal offers high scalability with a lightning module which provides easy embedding of videos and social media content.
Real estate
Drupal provides an enhanced content management that helps to manage all the data related to different properties and their status. In fact, there is a dedicated real estate module which provides the solution for the creation of real estate and property classifieds sites. It helps in displaying all the information related to a property such as address, images and Google Maps integration.
While no CMS is one-size-fits-all, Drupal 8 has been built to overcome the past shortcomings of Drupal and other CMS. It has the most ‘sought after’ features and modules in its core, and unlike with other proprietary CMS, you don’t need to keep on adding them.
With more developments in the new version of Drupal, I would profoundly suggest Drupal 8 than any other CMS. It ultimately gives you unlimited potential for minimal cost.
